Tag Archives: piano

Slow-mo practice is so …

… clearing of the mind, productive, reliable, useful …

… boring as hell.

It’s almost hard to trust it, because it’s almost like what I thought practice was as a kid — a way to just do something and have it get better by magic. Now, I get the neuro-wah-wah behind slow practice, but it still seems like magic on some level. I’ve had the experience of playing something painfully slowly with total focus a few times and suddenly experienced mega-leaps in my ability to play it. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do, but it still somehow strikes me as mysterious joo-joo on some level, like those times when you’ll have a flying dream and it will suddenly feel incredibly self-evident that if you just have the right attitude and hold your body in the right way, you start to float and then swim in mid-air or fly. Well, of course!

Magic.

Now in a dream, there’s no voice of reason that tells you, “You’re going to wind up on the floor, you.” In waking life though, there is. And I need a way to shut it up.

I also have to keep a lid on the power in my left hand again, or else I end up in a sort of arms race (*hyuk hyuk I said arms race* <—- points at the pun) where my left hand starts drowning out the right, and then I have to pound harder on that side, so my left arm responds by getting heavier, and pretty soon I'm exhausting myself and it all sounds like a mortar barrage. How many f's are in fortississississimo anyway? I think that's another thing I need to pay attention to with the Magic Joo-Joo Slow-Motion Practice™, just letting myself occasionally play something pianissimo and presto at the same time.

No fun last night

I dislike where this piece is headed for a variety of reasons — I’m doing nothing but 16th notes over and over and over and over in the bass, which is just too taxing. The way I’m hearing this piece is not for a piano; it’s for a band. I’m going to see if I can’t put a more 8/8 klezmer-ish rhythm in the bass … or maybe not put a rhythm at all in the bass and put the damn melody down there somehow.

At bottom, I just want to get that damn sound card and start recording my own stuff. *sigh*

Crap.

I could feel myself wanting to go a little art-tatum in the next remix of “Dove sei?” that I’m kicking around, so I did something stupid. I went to YouTube and searched on Art Tatum, and promptly got demoralized. *head slap*

Shit. Thanks, Art.

Oh, well. Gotta be done. I will keep listening.

Framizams and whatchamacallits

So I bought an external sound card, which is nice. I also figured out at least a bit on how to get stereo sound and mmmmmmm-decent sound quality through the Mic In, although it’s nothing wonderful. So things are moving forward. When the sound card gets here, I’ll start poking with that.

Then, I start recording, because I’ve truly gotten sick of talking about composing and not having links to music up on this damn thing.